Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument

My friend Jim and I visited the Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument in late May. It's a huge desert area between Bryce Canyon and Arches national parks. It's quite a diverse set of environments, from mountains to slot canyons. We spent about four days there and did a bit of driving and hiking. The great thing about this area is that it is full of world class scenery, yet very few people go there. So, unlike the national parks, you'll usually only see a few other people at any given time. And yet, Escalante has pretty good spots for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. 

The first day, we spent about a half hour wandering around at Hole in the Rocks, just west of the tiny town of Escalante, which served as our base. 

 

After walking around the Hole in the Rock rock formations, we headed over to the Spooky Gulch and Peekaboo Canyon trailhead. The approach hike was really a great hike in and of itself.

I loved the colors and wear patterns formed on the walls over thousands of years of periodic flash flooding. 

The light filtered down into the canyon and highlighted the many layers of sandstone deposits. These are on the vertical walls of the canyon, but they were the horizontal bottom of a sea tens of millions of years ago, then seismic forces crushed the entire area and upended the sea floor onto its side. Now the sedimentary stone is being worn away by floods over the intervening years.

This section is barely considered a slot canyon, as it's fairly wide in most places, so you don't have to squeeze sideways and take off your backpack. On the other hand, the very bottom of the canyon was not even as wide as my boot sole in some places. You can see how narrow it is at the bottom of this photo. Notice the sandy area that is the bottom. 

I had a great time doing the first part of the Spooky Gulch slot canyon hike, but I didn't take photos. My friend Jim waited for me to try a bit of it, then I bailed out after twenty minutes to rejoin him. It was really crazy to get started. You had to climb up a twelve-foot vertical rock face with only a couple of smooth dents in it for footholds. It was only because of my experience with indoor rock climbing with my brother that I had the skill and confidence to get started on it. Once I got started, the rest was not much easier. Almost every step was uphill, with four- or five-foot-high steps in many places. It was so much fun. After fifteen minutes it got so narrow you would have to turn sideways to get through, and it was following a serpentine shape - with ridiculously sharp turns every few feet. It looked amazing. 

The next day, we hiked to Lower Calf Creek Falls. In late May, the temperatures tend to be in the mid-80's, instead of 90's and above later in the summer. The hike is mostly flat and about three miles one way. 

This is the view of the canyon from the road that passes by above. The hike follows Lower Calf Creek, which waters all that greenery you can see along the bottom of the canyon in this photo. 

Once at the bottom of the canyon, you're looking up at impressive rock formations.

The walls of the canyons were hundreds of feet high, with amazing patterns of wear formed by a combination of rain, wind, bacterial, and geological forces, over thousands, even millions, of years. At times, it looked like an alien planet. 

I enjoy this image as if it were an abstract painting, with different styles and moods in different areas. Even though this is this is a stone cliff face hundreds of feet high, it is nearly perfectly smooth in some places, whereas other areas look scraped, gouged, flaked, and scalloped. At the same time, there is vertical striping, diagonal patches of ochre and orange, and textured horizontal layers crosscutting all of it. I imagine all the forces of nature as the artist composing the scene. A painting that took millions of years to create. 

Every good hike ends with a payoff view, and this was a good one. What an impressive waterfall, here in the middle of a desert, with a lovely pool that people were swimming in. Again, nature has "decorated" the orange and white stone with lime green, yellow, and blackish moss and lichen. The pattern of water on the rocks changed over time, depending on the flow of the water and wind. I specifically waited until the water had this beautiful cascading effect on the right side. At other times, there was no water at all on the right, so you had to notice this and take advantage of it.

On our final exploration of the area, we drove down East Burr Trail Road to Singing Canyon and beyond. The scenery along this section of road was spectacular, and yet there were only a few other people there. 

We learned that the different colors of stone making up the mountains and valleys of the area are the reason for the name Grand Staircase. Each layer is a different color, from the whites you see in the photo below, to the bright oranges in the subsequent photos, with a more tan sandy color for other areas. Each of these represents a deep layer formed over tens of millions of years and exposed by tectonic activity and wear and tear of the weather. In the photo below, I like all the etched patterns of layers of rock, which represent a story of various happenings in geologic time. Seas forming, earthquakes, floods, deposits, etc. 

This next two photos are from Singing Canyon. 

The funny thing is we didn't realize we were in Singing Canyon, but there was a guy there singing with his ukelele. The acoustics were fantastic. 

This entire canyon was just beautiful in all directions. This was just across from the Singing Canyon. 

This is another spot along the road with amazing patterns in the rock formed by so many different processes, from flaking of many layers of rock in the upper left, to microbes of different colors forming the vertical stripes following the flow of water running down the sheer rock face on the left, to fractures between distinct layers of rock in the lower portion of the photo. Astounding how there can be so many colors in a dry, stony, desert canyon. 

At the end of the canyon, we were treated to the view towards Capitol Reef National Park. 

I think there is much more to see in the area, so I'd like to go back someday soon. I recommend going before the secret is out!